Sickeningly Nice

The NYT points out that ABC's new Eli Stone, about a lawyer who sees the light of goodness (and a bunch of other things, a la Ally McBeal) joins an entertainment genre that "equate[s] character transformation with injury or accident."

In other words, you have to be sick to be that good.

For us, the film Regarding Henry, also about a brain-damaged lawyer who grows a conscience, here played by Harrison Ford, comes to, er, mind.

As does The Doctor, with William Hurt, in which a medical professional comes down with cancer and a bad case of caring.

Both were from 1991, clearly one of screen empathy's big years.

E is for Election

Who is the most empathetic candidate?

As a Democrat, I guess I would say it's between Obama and Clinton.

And the winner is.....

Of the two, it's Obama who TALKS a better game regarding empathy.

'The Empathy Deficit" and its companion "The Empathy Gap" have become regular catchphrases of Obama's run-up for two years.

In 2006, for just one example, he declared at a children's charity event:

"I think we're going to have to talk about the empathy deficit, the ability to put ourselves in someone else's shoes, to see the world through someone else's eyes...It's time for a sense of empathy to infuse our politics in America."

More recently, this past MLK day, Jan. 22, he declared:

"I’m not talking about a budget deficit. I’m not talking about a trade deficit. I’m not talking about a deficit of good ideas or new plans.

I’m talking about a moral deficit. I’m talking about an empathy deficit. I’m taking about an inability to recognize ourselves in one another; to understand that we are our brother’s keeper; we are our sister’s keeper; that, in the words of Dr. King, we are all tied together in a single garment of destiny.

We have an empathy deficit when we’re still sending our children down corridors of shame – schools in the forgotten corners of America where the color of your skin still affects the content of your education.

We have a deficit when CEOs are making more in ten minutes than some workers make in ten months; when families lose their homes so that lenders make a profit; when mothers can’t afford a doctor when their children get sick.

We have a deficit in this country when there is Scooter Libby justice for some and Jena justice for others; when our children see nooses hanging from a schoolyard tree today, in the present, in the twenty-first century.

We have a deficit when homeless veterans sleep on the streets of our cities; when innocents are slaughtered in the deserts of Darfur; when young Americans serve tour after tour of duty in a war that should’ve never been authorized and never been waged.

And we have a deficit when it takes a breach in our levees to reveal a breach in our compassion; when it takes a terrible storm to reveal the hungry that God calls on us to feed; the sick He calls on us to care for; the least of these He commands that we treat as our own."

Powerful stuff.

But can anyone back it up when so many, frankly, don't seem to care?

Doctor No-Love

You read these heartfelt essays in medical journals about how important it is to teach today's medical students to empathize, to be more compassionate, clarion calls to make sensitivity training a cornerstone of modern medical education.

New surgical gowns from the UK have little zippers on them where typical surgical incisions are made. Students wear them to get a sense of what its like to be, well, carved up.

So, what happens after they graduate? Where does the love go?

The doctors I encounter are pretty much all business, cold, cranky and trying to fit in just one more Medicaid payment before lunch.

Apparently, their brains make them do it.

MRI scans conducted at the U. of Chicago show that, in order to do their jobs, doctors deactivate the neural circuitry that makes them able to empathize with other people's pain while performing procedures like taking blood.

Ouch for me.

Maybe their brains get so good at this robot act that they can't just switch it off for regular patient interaction.

That would explain a lot.

The Talented Mr. Gates

Humanitarian of our time Bill Gates is a psuedo-mystery to me. "Pseudo" because I bet if I met him all would become clear (thanks to my powerful empathic abililities!), but from a distance, he confounds.

See, I'm thinking in terms of the empathic/systemizing theory put forward by none other than Simon Baron-Cohen from a previous post. (Take this test to find your empathy and systemizing quotients.)

Basically, the idea offered up in Simon's 2003 book, The Essential Difference: Male and Female Brains and the Truth about Autism goes a little something like this:

There are two types of brains, those that spontaneously systemize (S) to a greater degree (track, sort and order things) and those that empathize (E) more (understand and connect with others' thoughts and feelings). More males than females have brains of type S.

Yeah, we noticed.

So where, then, does old Billy Boy fit in?

The guy was nothing if not a systemizing, geekaholic extraordinaire. He became the poster child for technology and automated, computerized, logical thought in our time. He was the nerd king. He talked (and sometimes screamed) the talk and walked the walk.

He wore glasses.

But in 2006, Gates announced he would semi-retire in July '08 to become a....a....philanthropist.

His Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, with its foci on various Third World matters of import (hunger, AIDS, farming, Malaria), would seem a veritable mother's den of empathy.

An oration he delivered this week at the World Economic Forum is so altruistic it almost makes you think Mr. Software is, well, a systemizing softie and that maybe we need a new category: Empathic Systemizer (ES).

Or maybe it's just Melinda's influence.

Here are parts of Bill's speech:

"Some of us are lucky enough to arrive at moments in life where we can pause, reflect on our work, and say: 'This is great. It's fun, exciting, and useful—I could do this forever.'

But the passing of time forces each of us to take stock and ask: What have I accomplished so far? What do I still want to accomplish?

Thirty years, twenty years, ten years ago, my focus was totally on how the magic of software could change the world.

I believed that breakthroughs in technology could solve the key problems. And they do—increasingly—for billions of people.

But breakthroughs change lives only where people can afford to buy them—only where there is economic demand.

And economic demand is not the same as economic need.

There are billions of people who need the great inventions of the computer age, and many more basic needs as well. But they have no way of expressing their needs in ways that matter to markets. So they go without.

If we are going to have a serious chance of changing their lives, we will need another level of innovation. Not just technology innovation—we need system innovation....

The world is getting better, but it’s not getting better fast enough, and it's not getting better for everyone.

The great advances in the world have often aggravated the inequities in the world. The least needy see the most improvement, and the most needy see the least—in particular the billion people who live on less than a dollar a day.

There are roughly a billion people in the world who don't get enough food, who don't have clean drinking water, who don't have electricity, the things that we take for granted.

Diseases like malaria that kill over a million people a year get far less attention than drugs to help with baldness....

Why do people benefit in inverse proportion to their need?

Market incentives make that happen.

In a system of pure capitalism, as people's wealth rises, the financial incentive to serve them rises. As their wealth falls, the financial incentive to serve them falls—until it becomes zero....

As I see it, there are two great forces of human nature: self-interest, and caring for others. Capitalism harnesses self-interest in helpful and sustainable ways, but only on behalf of those who can pay. Philanthropy and government aid channel our caring for those who can't pay, but the resources run out before they meet the need.

But to provide rapid improvement for the poor we need a system that draws in innovators and businesses in a far better way than we do today.

Such a system would have a twin mission: making profits and also improving lives for those who don't fully benefit from market forces. To make the system sustainable, we need to use profit incentives whenever we can.

At the same time, profits are not always possible when business tries to serve the very poor. In such cases, there needs to be another market-based incentive—and that incentive is recognition....

I like to call this new system creative capitalism—an approach where governments, businesses, and nonprofits work together to stretch the reach of market forces so that more people can make a profit, or gain recognition, doing work that eases the world's inequities....

I'd like to ask everyone here—whether you're in business, government or the non-profit world—to take on a project of creative capitalism in the coming year....When you award foreign aid, when you make charitable gifts, when you try to change the world—can you also find ways to put the power of market forces behind the effort to help the poor?"

So, is Gates a laudable, bleeding heart Empathizer who weeps at the sight of poor children suffering?

Or merely a bored, under-challenged Systemizer looking to apply order and logic to his next "fun," "exciting" systems problem: the human race?

What do you think?

Hare Raising

Nature has a colorful piece by Allsion Abbot on how scientists scan psychopaths' brains in to gain insight into empathy. (Not to help the psychopaths themselves or anything, 'cause everybody knows they're way incurable and mean.) :

"Wearing nothing but blue cotton surgical pajamas and a constant smile, patient 13 doesn't seem to present much of a threat...But no one is forgetting why he was recruited for...[this] study. Patient 13 has scored the maximum possible on the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R)...rating scale...Lack of empathy is a key feature."

There's also a quote from criminal psych bigwig, Robert Hare, who developed the frickin' PCL-R and must be going loopy now or something as he comes out, of all things, in favor of psychopathy and lack of empathy in certain situations:

"'Some psychopathic features are not necessarily a bad thing for society--in some professions they may even help...Too much empathy, for example, on the part of a police officer or a politician would interfere with the job.'"

Say it ain't so, Bobby.

Bombs Away

HBO's new psycho-drama, In Treatment, eavesdrops on the sessions of a troubled shrink (Gabrielle Bryne) and four of his clients, including an empathy-challenged fighter pilot (Blair Underwood) who feels no remorse for dropping a bomb that killed 16 Iraqi schoolchildren.

Actually, a certain amount of empathy can help in committing war crimes, according to a gem called "The Hearts-and-Minds Myth" in Armed Forces Journal:

"Mastering the languages, cultural nuances, beliefs and taboos that prevail in a theater of war, area of operations or tactical environment is vital to military success. It's much easier to kill people you understand."

I get you, now die!

Da Empath E Show

As the product of an English mother and an American Jewish father, I have some idea of the radically opposing cultural pressures that may have shaped the British Baron-Cohen boys growing up.

Still, you gotta marvel at these guys' disparate vocational identities: Sacha Baron-Cohen, the doofy lord of cruelty-as-entertainment of Borat fame who mocks his unwitting subjects without, seemingly, a conscience, and first cousin Simon, a professor of developmental psychopathology who studies empathy for a living. Hello childhood seder table, wish I were there!

Simon is particularly focused on Autism and theory of mind -- the recognition that other people have thoughts and feelings too. Autistic people have trouble with that and, hence, trouble with empathy.

But does that mean Rainman was an uncaring psychopath?

Not if you go by the MRI studies.

It seems there are (at least) two kinds of empathy: cognitive (the ability to read other people's faces, feelings etc.) and emotional (actually caring once you do!). Autistic types can't do the former, but don't seem to show any particular deficit in the latter. In other words, if you tell them, they will feel. They lack the ability to detect other people's emotions, but if you inform them of the fact that you are, say, sad, they will feel bad about it. Not so the psychopath.

The scientists know this stuff from studying people with Alzheimer's and brain lesions in a particular area of the brain which is shaping up to be the go-to spot for empathy: the ventral medial prefrontal cortex.

Rebecca Saxe, MIT's MRI Minx, puts it best:

"Studies of neuropsychological patients suggest a double dissociation between ‘cognitive empathy’ (that is, Theory of Mind) and ‘emotional empathy'....Blair...argues that autism is characterised primarily by deficits of ‘cognitive empathy’, leaving emotional empathy relatively intact."

Meanwhile, we're waiting for cousin's day at the brain imaging lab...

Your Brain on Love

You gotta love oxytocin. It's so much more than just than your grandmother's old breastfeeding and birth inducing hormone.

It aids in wound healing.

It reduces fear.

It's released during cuddling, getting a massage, and -- wait for it -- orgasm. (So that explains why he called the next day...)

If you give people a whiff of it, they're most trusting and generous. (Oxytocin Trust Spray for sale!?)

Pregnant moms with naturally high levels later turn out to be the nicest and most nurturing (as in "goo-goo ga-ga") with their babies.

And what if, well, oxy isn't free-flowing?

Trouble.

Over at Rockefeller U., they study knock-out mice that lack the oxytocin gene and, let's just say, it ain't pretty.

The females get all up in the face of other mice, male and female -- and their pups die from lack of milk. And they don't recognize their friends.

That goes for the males too. Without oxy, they show absolutely no preference whatsoever for their conspecifics (that's "they ignore their girlfriends and go after new tail" to you and me.)

Watch bitch mice fighting.

Worship at oxytocin's altar further at Hug the Monkey.

Explore oxytocin's sensual side at Reuniting.

Wavelengths

Remember the tsunami, the 2004 Asian death wave that wiped out some 225,000 people -- mostly children and their mothers who tried to save them and so got swept away -- the worst tsunami in history?

Of course you do. Because you are not a heartless SOB, because you care, because you have E (empathy) in spades.

But I remember that day, crying, watching CNN's images of upturned limbs bobbing in debris-filled water where villages used to be and getting this reaction:

Disbelieving eyeroll, annoyance. "You can't be serious."

Me: "It's really upsetting. If you watched it...you would...be effected."

Non-empathizer: Shrug followed by head shake. "No I wouldn't."

Me: "But so many people..."

Non-empathizer: Showing no emotion. "People die every day."

Yeah...well...they do.

And so this blog was born.

Most of us care. But some care less. Some care more. And yes, some really do not care at all.

How come?